When oil prices surged near record highs in recent years, China’s state-owned energy companies bet prices could climb even higher, paying top dollar for assets around the world and pushing aggressively to develop new resources at home. Now, as oil prices have lost around half their value in less than a year, China’s biggest energy companies are in the midst of a rare pull back. Cnooc Ltd. —the listed arm of China’s main state-owned offshore oil-and-gas producer—said Tuesday it planned to cut capital spending by 26% to 35% in 2015 compared with a year earlier, its first such drop since 2010. The company could be facing write-downs of more than $5 billion […]